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I agree with the sentiment of what you're saying, but I don't agree with the premise that there are no use cases for single page apps. You can achieve a decent UX for some applications by using small amounts of vanilla JS, but it's simply not possible to avoid re-rendering the entire page without using XHR requests at some point. That is how the browser is designed, fundamentally. Because it wasn't designed as an application platform, it was designed as a document platform.

But some products are actually better as applications, not interconnected documents. For those applications, the browser fights you every step of the way, because that's not what it's designed for. You simply can't compare the UX of document-based web applications to native clients.

An SPA is just the web approximation of a native client. Your application truly runs in the client process continuously, so rendering transitions happen smoothly instead of blank pages and jumping transitions. Everyone would benefit from understanding more and using that to simplify all areas of the tech stack, but the experience that an SPA offers is simply not possible otherwise.

SPA is a poor approximation of a native client with a hugely bloated browser stuck in some level of the abstraction, bypassing native app libraries, design sensibilities, typography guidelines and accessibility by implementing some UI framework that was developed by people that are entirely unqualified for it. Have you looked it the guidelines for UI development, say for MacOS? Here you go: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

PWAs, browser apps - they bypass all this work from professionals and give it in the hands of an unequiped developer. Oh god.

A browser is a window, an area of the screen that is allowed to do whatever it wants in a sandbox mode. This is a terrible idea. It becomes complete wild-wild-west.

>it's simply not possible to avoid re-rendering the entire page without using XHR

Wrong on two separate levels.

First up, technologies like iframes, frames, and objects/embeds allow that just fine; you can use at least some of them without any JS whatsoever.

Secondly, with avoiding re-rendering you end up avoiding a 200ms ... 500ms load+render of simple full page, at the cost of doing 2...5 seconds of gradual load+render of various bits and pieces. Bits and pieces that often are so unwieldy they cause widgets & content to load gradually, jump around, and sometimes even get hidden behind a loader. While the CPU fan keeps whining at full revs.

The solution became worse than the problem it purported to solve, and your users pay the price in wasted time + RAM + electricity.

If you pay even a little attention to order of loading you can avoid FOUC entirely. If you pay a little attention to defining sizes of leading elements, you'll have constant layout of the top part of the page, and avoid flash of white background. If you use anchors here and there your user will be scrolled to the proper position.

Yes your page can easily look as if it got only updated with JS after doing a full load+render.

The technology is already in the browser; no need to approximate it with three layers of JS.

You can’t compare the UI of a web page built in this way to an SPA or a native client. Re-rendering an entire page on every interaction is strategically never going to get you the same experience. I understand wanting to be a browser purist, but web applications have had pretty laughable UX compared to native apps of even 20 years ago.

I mean look at an iOS app designed by Apple. I always reference the AppStore app itself. You simply can’t build that app as a web app, certainly not by using iframes as a “solution.”

You don't need an SPA to use XHR, and your description of the SPA experience for the end user is a fantasy - there's a reason pretty progress bars are popular in SPAs, and it's not because of fast state changes, quite the reverse.

It's funny, your example actually shows the primary benefit of an SPA, and doesn't do anything to show any downsides. A progress bar is a perfect example. You can't show a progress bar with HTML. You would have clicked something, and a new page would be rendered entirely. In the time it took to create the new page on the backend, the user would be staring at either a white screen or the current page. If they're looking at the current page, they probably think the application is malfunctioning, as no user feedback was given to their action.

Whereas, with an SPA, you can _instantly_ show a progress bar, at least indicating that something is going on. And, the very fact that you're showing a progress bar means that the client side rendering isn't the slow action, it's retrieving something from the server. So, the UI was as interactive as possible.

This is an amazing feature you simply don't need on the majority of web apps, because a) the browser has a loading indicator and b) most web apps are fast enough to not need to tell the user about it, they just load new pages in milliseconds instead.

An in-page progress bar is in most cases a failure of UX, not a success.

I'm pretty sure I can find more pages that take more than 200 milliseconds to load than ones that are under.

Please write more about this because I feel the exact same.

Use built in HTML forms. Let the page refresh, what's wrong with going to `/orders/{order_id}` page to get information about the order? It is REST-ful and static. Why do you want things moving around and reacting? People of the internet - imagine if the internet protocols were given to us, but no browser existed. Would we develop this non-sense we have today?

What should have happened is the following:

- Develop web-to-native-UI mapper, call that thing a browser.

- Don't let developers style native elements. A drop down should not be designed by people except for the owners of the OS. Yes, it looks different on different OS but your application should be more than putting lipstick on a pig.

- Accept the fact that your application looks different on different OS'es but embrace the fact that your application works intuitively to the users, you have much less to maintain and focus on the logic of your app.

The web went downhill the day `<input>` tag was allowed to be styled by CSS. We had a web-to-native-UI mapper!

I am forever a believer that democratically designed things generally suck unless there is a BDFL who can make shots. Dictatorship is a necessity of great products and services - Steve Jobs to Guido, democracy is good in politics, not in software development. Feature creep from the public will ruin whatever youre buidling. Designers will ravage through what worked well and replace it with "taste".

/Rant, I am getting old. Humans tried to make the web "pop", but instead it exploded with chaos.

Let the page refresh, what's wrong with going to `/orders/{order_id}` page to get information about the order? It is REST-ful and static

Exactly. As a bonus, you automatically get the behaviour associated with a link that browsers already implement: people can bookmark a link for later use, open it in a new window, etc. All of which would need extra effort (and thus also easily break) if it was just a clickable element invoking some JS.

I've had some pretty annoying conversations with customer support and developers about things like this; almost always, the response is something like "we didn't think you would have a need to do that". They would not have needed to think about it at all, and it would work for me, if they had just used a regular link.

That said I'm not totally opposed to SPAs; highly interactive apps, e.g. realtime games and such, would definitely benefit as they wouldn't really make sense as a linked set of documents. But for everything else it feels like they not only reinvent the wheel, but make it square.

It's not even the ability to bookmark it. It's basic stuff like the ability to restart my computer (e.g. because Windows demands that for updates), and go back to the same exact spot I've been at. For desktop apps, this works. For web pages that are just web pages, it works. But with something like Facebook, if you close a tab in which you've been scrolling through the feed, that state is forever lost.

“Let the page refresh” translates to a terrible UX. It devalues the application. It’s equivalent to buying a physical product, say a car, but the car jerks up and down whenever you hit the gas, and you hit your head on the roof every time.

Yea, the web page _works_ but it’s ugly, and in poor taste. Users do not care about browser purity, they want an app that seems polished. You can’t get that experience by using semantic HTML at all.

I'm pretty sure blind people don't even notice this 'terrible UX' problem you describe, and that sighted folks aren't quite as jarred by it as you think.

This 'taste' issue probably matters more in some organizations than others. Hopefully they don't involve blind people in their business, because SPAs are notorious for being unusable to them. You can design an SPA with accessibility in mind (https://www.deque.com/blog/accessibility-tips-in-single-page...) but most devs either can't be bothered or aren't even aware of the issue.

Yes, people who don't have the ability to see won't care about flickering on the screen and the better user experience that a single page app affords to users who can see. Not even sure why you're making that point other than to try and imply that people who write single page apps automatically don't care about blind people, which is self-righteous and rude.

We have a single page app and we regularly run it through screen readers to see what the experience is like. Since an SPA is not some magical entity and it does produce a real DOM tree, we can achieve a great degree of accessibility (not perfect) by simply focusing on the markup that's produced. That doesn't help with things like loading screens, but again, since we actually check applications on screen readers, the experience for pages that take a long time to render is not much better with pure HTML either.

I read the link you posted and it's a good resource. The #1 takeaway I got from it is:

> Make sure that client-side view changes are known to screen reader users by announcing the change in page title, using ARIA live regions and/or focus management.

That's a good idea and one we'll incorporate into our application.

Some other comments in the article are not helpful, such as:

> Consider whether a single-page app is really necessary, and if you even need to use a JavaScript framework at all.

This is a moot point. Using a JavaScript framework to create an application is not only acceptable, but extremely popular. So instead of trying to politically smash the idea of building an application using JavaScript, we should be focusing on how to improve accessibility in that landscape. We can and should figure things out.

I appreciate you taking the time to look at that.

I'm glad there are people out there taking the accessibility issue seriously, what you said does make me more inclined to evaluate framework-based solutions. Nice to know at least parts of the most popular JS platforms are maturing enough for this to be easier for devs to implement.

Can't agree more. It's a very simple point but I am surprised that people couldn't realize it and even downvoted your view.

IMO, discussing this further will just yield a negative returns as I think there are some fundamental issues/gap between two parties in this thread.

No matter how much ppl kick and scream, the SPA is gonna make the web a much more user friendly place in general. When we fade away and the next generation of us come, they will take this as the new norm easily and happily.

Not sure why you think SPAs can't have unique URLs or real links.

They can, but it requires additional work on the part of the developers, which in my experience is almost never done. Also, that's kind of what the SPA acronym stands for, no?

It does not require much work, and basically none of you use any standard libraries or frameworks, which handle it all for you.

And SPA doesn’t mean you can’t use real links or pages.

> Use built in HTML forms. Let the page refresh, what's wrong with going to `/orders/{order_id}` page to get information about the order? It is REST-ful and static.

To be completely honest, this is one of my least favorite things about HN. As I write this comment and click reply, if I wish to navigate “back” after I post this comment, the first back button click with take me to this still-filled comment form. (Will I fuck anything up by clicking “reply” once more? This is an easy trap for a user to fall into.) The second back will take me back to the post comments. Which is weird, because this is where I was taken after posting the comment. The third back will take me back to HN homepage. I expect to go back to the homepage on the first back click.

And this nav stack works as it does because HN uses plain HTML forms without any “overkill” JS. But the reality is that the default back behavior doesn’t really fit most user expectations, because most people don’t understand that clicking each of these buttons added more and more to the stack. Most people don’t know what a stack is! :) I think this is a great example of why the default document behavior of the web doesn’t really match most people’s user expectations, and the normal form behavior on the web makes it way to easy to do the wrong thing, like re-submit information.

> Will I fuck anything up by clicking “reply” once more? This is an easy trap for a user to fall into

Have you tried clicking "Reply" once more after going back? If not, do try.

> Use built in HTML forms. Let the page refresh, what's wrong with going to `/orders/{order_id}` page to get information about the order

Designer hate it

> Don't let developers style native elements. A drop down should not be designed by people except for the owners of the OS. Yes, it looks different on different OS but your application should be more than putting lipstick on a pig.

> Accept the fact that your application looks different on different OS'es but embrace the fact that your application works intuitively to the users, you have much less to maintain and focus on the logic of your app.

I'm not sure if this was supposed to be a case of 'how it once was' or 'how it should be', but this was never a reality, at least after the 90s. Native apps have always tried to style themselves just so (my company has a C# B2B GUI that has a little bit of assembly somewhere calling a Windows interrupt directly because they couldn't figure out another way to change the color of some window element). Even the earliest web pages were often trying to look as different as possible.

How is it that there are so many of us, but I never seem to work with any of you?

haha, I ask myself the same question.

Someone should make a job board called noSPAjobs.com

Just chiming in to say this is an absolutely viable approach. I just built a project, over about six weeks, using mostly vanilla js and some jquery (the heaviest widget I have is tinymce, which is a necessity unfortunately), and started selling it about two weeks in. I'm up to $650 mrr and the sky's the limit (really, the market is huge and desperately underserved), and not one person has complained about it acting like an old style website. People are just happy it works. And mobile testing was a breeze.

If I tried to build this on a "modern" stack I cannot imagine any benefit, only drawbacks.

Got a link? I'm curious what your end product looks like.

So unfortunately the live project has no public-facing component; without going into too much detail it helps certain corporations and larger nonprofits with a kind of compliance. But, I can tell you that I based it very closely on the layouts provided by the ultra lightweight css framework, PureCSS. (This is also my favorite framework!)

https://purecss.io

The layouts are here:

https://purecss.io/layouts/

One other remark: people are happy when they learn about this. That is now my #1 predictor of success. Everyone I've demoed to has adopted the product within a day (usually during the demo), and tech wise it's no different from what was possible with the web 15 years ago.

> loads 50x-100x faster

And takes less time to develop in the first place! These frameworks just seem like pure overhead to me.

You end up dupe your layout page everywhere and have a hard time update all of them if designer changed their mind.

Or you could use some template system to do that… but if you need to use template, why not use react(or something like that) anyway?

Because Rails, Symphony, Django, Phoenix or whatever does the job in the preferred language of the developer/team and often has more batteries or better tooling included.

I bet those are not a Front end's preferred language and you end up need JavaScript anyway if you need some extra client form handling. Now you use two language to do one thing and made it more difficult to be maintained.

That problem was solved approx 20 years ago.

The alternatives are not react and templates vs writing html by hand.

The browsers had support for XSL templates

You write your website in XML and the browser renders it using the template

100% agree.

KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid - Never let me down.

I'm agreeing with you that the "modern web" is too complex, but the "make a folder and sync it to a Linux box" solution doesn't work very well for real-world use. It's easier and a lot faster to sync your static site to something like S3 or Google Cloud Storage and serve it from there. Now you don't need to secure and update your Linux box or be responsible for its uptime.

>It's easier and a lot faster to sync your static site to something like S3 or Google Cloud Storage and serve it from there. Now you don't need to secure and update your Linux box or be responsible for its uptime.

I was pushing to *nix hosts I didn't have to manage in early 2000. Actually, one of them I recently remembered and had paid a small lifetime membership for limited static hosting (<$100) and simple shell access and guess what--the pages I put together 20 years ago and supplemental files I had hosted are still there. Not only that, they still render as intended.

I've done absolutely nothing for 20 years at this specific host and it's working today. Yes, the content is fairly static and very simple (its 20 years old) but it's all there. It's a simple shared system and no it wouldn't scale out to support more than probably 10k simultaneous requests but its served its purpose over the years. No, there's no SLA. I'm not saying services like S3 haven't been able to improve on that older infrastructure but it goes to show what very simple systems are capable of.

I've not spent a second of time in 20 years worrying about security, someone else did for a very nominal fee. This isn't a new concept, now we have better scaling available for sure.